If you're a DIRECTV viewer, don't beat up the ATSC HDTV channels for picture quality - the current state of picture quality in high-definition television is driven by commercial interests, primarily. Given the spectrum/bandwidth, broadcasters are looking to maximize the number of channels they can send, which means dividing up a 30 mbs pipe into as many chunks as possible. It looks to me like they are doing VBR encoding and crossing their fingers that the statmux won't experience two bitrate peaks at the same time.

Nevertheless, there is one thing that all the HD broadcasters are guilty of, which would make a significant impact in picture quality on most dramatic television. Currently, many HDTV shows which originate on 35mm film are broadcast in 1080i with the pulldown still present in the source material. This footage should be going through an inverse telecine prior to ingest. The reasons for this are both aesthetic and financial. Using inverse telecine at 1080i results in at least a 25-40% reduction in bandwidth. This is a real reduction. Instead of encoding 29.97 interlaced frames per second, only 24 progressive frames are sent (the original frames from film). There are rare instances where cuts done on the Avid will produce a short 2 or 3 frame sequence that is truly interlaced (pulldown sync lost during edit).

The impact on both picture quality and bandwidth would be startling. Personally, I think true interlacing in HDTV should be deprecated. Interlacing is an artifact from an era where we watched material on interlaced devices. It was a compromise based on technological constraints. A large number of HDTV screens now are LCD based. Interlaced content looks terrible on LCD screens. And many of the HDTV screens that are interlaced at 1080i do not implement 1080p correctly. Those latter manufacturers should be penalized by the consumer for failing to support the standard, and 1080p should be king of both content and display. 1080i, given the bandwidth allocation chosen by broadcasters is a complete wash. In low motion scenes, where there is no advantage to interlacing on a true HDTV, 1080p would be better looking than 1080i, and in high-motion scenes, the added complexity of encoding interlacing and an extra 6fps means that the temporal resolution promised by 1080i is in fact, transmuted into a blocky mess by the channel constraints/encoder.

If temporal resolution is what is needed (live football, soccer etc), 720p at 60fps is the way to go.